


Think

by genderneutralnoun



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 12:49:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13271784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genderneutralnoun/pseuds/genderneutralnoun
Summary: Do not read this story unless you want a conflicted, uneasy answer to the question, "Is life worth it?" Do not be surprised at what you may find. Expect anything. Hope for nothing. And let your hopes be dashed.





	Think

Think!

Think of the possibilities! Think on the hugeness of the world! Think of all the chances you could take, all the chances you let slip away! Think!

Think of the people you know! Think of your dearest friends! Think of the times you’d thought of them for simple things! Think of how many others there are! Think of how many potential relationships just like this lie in wait! Think of all the friends you’ll never have! Think!

Think of who you love! Think of all the loves you’ll never know! Think of how many things you could learn to love! Think of what you could learn to hate! Think!

Think of your family! Think of the parents you have! Think of the guardians you could have had! Think of your siblings! Think on your loved ones’ eventual deaths! Think!

Think of all the ideas you’ve had! Think of all the stories you’ll never write! Think of all the images you’ll never recreate! Think of all the thoughts that lay unused! Think!

Think of every moment! Think af every sensation! Yes, yes; feel your body now, feel you eyes on this screen and your hands! What are they touching? What is the rest of your skin touching? Are you touching yourself? Is someone else touching you? Has anyone ever touched you? Smell their scent on you, smell all the scents around you. What are you hearing? What are you tasting? What emotion bubbles up in you now, like a raging, bubbling, boiling froth, the stench of panic and insanity rising thick and heavy from its depths?

Every moment spent is precious. Every moment before exists only in memory. Every moment you sit here,  **someone dies.** Every moment you sit here,  **a star is born.** Every moment you sit here,  **over seven billion people’s lives change, forever.**

Every moment is a moment wasted. Every moment is a moment used.

There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ beyond what we make up ourselves. Everything we take as the world around us is but an amalgamation of what our limited senses can perceive. We made it all up. We’re all playing a big game of pretend, guided by what little we know about the world.

Everything is made by us.

Everything can be destroyed by us.

Everything that has been destroyed,  _ was  _ destroyed by us. 

We have no power.

But we also have  _ all  _ the power.

If reality is but our creation, then we have all the power to change it. Just believe that it shall happen, and it will.

 

* * *

 

Let me tell you a story.

 

* * *

 

Long ago, there was a girl whose name is not important. The girl was young and powerful, more powerful than many her age. Others feared that power, for it made her different, outside of the petty rules they had created to make themselves feel powerful. But that is not power. Power is either born within a person, given to them by another, or learned through hard work, and the latter is the  **one true strength.** It comes from how one expresses themselves, how one can change the world around them, how one can move through and manipulate the thing around them which we call reality. It is what we call beauty and art, language and song, stories and dances and every facet of individuality that is our true strength of being so many complex people- we are not one, we are many, and that is what makes us dangerous.

Because of her strangeness, the girl was abused. Her wings smashed, her spirit broken. All while her abusers looked her right in the eyes and told her it was for her own good.

Perhaps it was. After all, how can she know? How can she form her own self and ideas with people always telling her she’s wrong, wrong, wrong?

Eventually, the girl died. It did not take very long.

From her ashes was born a fragile replacement, a sad mockery of what she could have been. She still had power, more power than was acceptable to her betters, but a messier, weaker power, one that never knew what to do with itself, and often hid or bared its fangs at the worst possible times for each to happen. She inherited a great burden of guilt and hard-drilled knowledge; shame and attempts of self-preservation. She had tattered wings and glass skin, and flinched away if someone so much as touched her, flaring her shredded wings up over her face in a desperate defense. 

She had all the genius of her old form, but an internal chaos that froze her mind in fear. She had all the talent of her old form, but a paralyzing shame when things didn’t go right. She had all the untamed, raw strength of her old form, but she hid and shunned it, afraid of what it might do if let go. She had the same sense of honor as her old self, but no more courage left to act on it; so it merely drained her as she looked on in horror at the scenes she could do nothing about.

She was weak. She was scared. She tried so hard to overcome her shortcomings and break away the obstacles that had formed as a desperate defense in her time of pain, but any time she tried, her abusers would shriek in outrage, slamming back into the sensitive, unhealed wounds with even sharper talons than before.  _ “THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD,”  _ they growled as they wrapped chains around her wings, her hands, her snout.  _ “SOMEDAY, YOU WILL BE THANKFUL.” _

And, horribly, they were right.

Because that girl gave up. Long after she had stopped counting the times she’d shattered, she saw only one way to protect herself; a desperate gambit that would give her a living death. She accepted it, and sat patiently, unmoving and unblinking as they hurled insults and disgusting compliments alike. She did not forgive them; as, had it been anyone else but her, she would have murdered them for their sins; but was only ever silent, lying to those who had proven themselves untrustworthy as easily as she breathed, saying  _ I’m sorry _ with such emptiness that it was a wonder they couldn’t sense it. She sat patiently as they rewarded and congratulated her for her cold, empty reactions, showing no emotion, because emotion was a sign of weakness. She did not move as they gushed over her progress; her progress towards their horrifying fantasy, her progress further and further away from the person she should have been, the person she wanted to be. 

Sometimes, she wanted to break. She wanted to shout the truth, shout it from the rooftops; she wanted to say who she was and why that was beautiful; she wanted to wrap her hands around their necks and break them with a clean, satisfying snap. She wanted to dig her claws into their stomachs; she wanted to slash off their horrible, ugly, lying faces and rip out their detested, filthy, treacherous throats. She wanted to get up and spread her ruined wings in front of everyone, show them the blood dripping down from the wounds she had to hide, show them her disastrous, dangerous, painful beauty; the kind of burning glory and utter contempt that can only come from a lifetime of insanity and confusion, and the final, horrible peace that settles in before the end.

And sometimes she did break. Never so gloriously or expressively as all that; in small, contained explosions, ones that she saw coming  **but no one believed her** , ones that made such horrible sense  **but no one tried to understand** , ones that shattered her a little more badly than the one before  **but everyone denied it** . Caught between what she knew she felt and what they told her she did, she cried and cried and cried for someone, anyone, to help her and and guide her and hold her and comfort her and love her as no one had ever done before,  **BUT NOBODY CAME.**

**Nobody** **_ever_ ** **came.**

 

* * *

 

And that is where we must leave our story, for the ending is exactly as it is described: that nobody came. Nobody has yet to come. It’s possible that nobody will  _ ever  _ come, and our girl will be alone forever, the only people she can count on the ones she finds herself. And those, those will never be enough, because they will never know how horribly hurt she is, how impossibly scarred she is, how irrevocably damned she is to a life of pain, and pain, and pain. 

She’s so scared. She’s scared of the impossible, looming feeling she always has, that something terrible is about to happen, that another blessed thing she has but never deserved is about to be taken from her. She’d rather die than lose the pitiful towers and bridges she’s built. She rather die than let any of of them come to harm. Death would be less painful. Oblivion would be less painful. Anything would be less painful than this life, this cursed life, this impossible life, this life that started so hopeful and could have been so bright but is now impossibly stained and ruined, falling away before her eyes, breaking faster and faster with each time she tries to hold it together.

But she cannot die.

She feels immortal. She feels as old as time. She knows everything, somehow- if she had the time to think, she could name every star in the sky, and the native peoples who live among them; she could tell you what lies beneath the great, crushing ocean, how a terrible crack is formed in the bottom of the Atlantic plate, where the heat and pressure is so strong that seawater touches bare magma without either changing, where tiny creatures too small to see with the most powerful microscope feast on as-of-yet unnamed particles and live among the shifting baubles that are the atoms of molten rock; she could tell you about the deepest reaches of space, where the universe ends,  _ when  _ the universe ends, because traveling through space is traveling through time and if you swim far enough from the ancient star nurseries and the first clouds of dust that were so hot that if oxygen existed for fire to form, a single quark would set ablaze everything within billions of leagues, you can see the  _ birth _ of the universe, and become one with it; return to starstuff in the void that first was and be expelled ever outward again, racing through time and space and arriving where you once did so long ago and slowly shifting into what became, or what  _ will _ become, your body and the meager consciousness that allowed itself to split off from the rest of the universe that makes up every insentient being and star and planet and  _ speck  _ that floats through endless, endless space, and time with it. All of these things, beyond human understanding, and yet here, in this one girl, who hasn’t the words to describe it all, whose puny human mind is so confused by these impossible concepts that all she can see, when she looks into her mind, is an ever-flickering, always-changing mess, like garbage data or digital noise, as the only thing she can interpret it as.

This is a great blessing and a great curse, both to her and to humanity as well. For she is proof that we are living a lie, and the truth is incomprehensible to any of us. She is the proof that we are limited, simple, fragile beings, who in the scale of sentience barely qualify as worth anyone’s time. It is most pitiful.

But that is not what I set out to communicate here, nor what you should take away from this. Of course, I cannot stop you from thinking about it for the rest of your tiny, tiny life; it is only the truth.

What I wanted to express here is a unique feeling. As far as I am aware, the English language has no word even close to it, and that is the only language I am familiar with; but I shall attempt to describe it all the same. It is what you feel when you realize that everything matters  _ precisely because  _ nothing matters. That any meaning is made up, and therefore, it is all so meaningful. It’s because we live in a world of pretend that the world is precious, because we can change things. There are innumerable amounts of other living things in the world that all play roles in it like actors, all of whom don’t know what the next scene will be. But they build upon the past, and face the future; with every birth a new story begins. Children learn from the people around them, and they act out what they have learned, and then they change the world the way that they learned to. We all learn from our game of pretend. And since it’s the only thing we have, why not make it count?  _~_

 


End file.
